Posts Tagged ‘unconditional love’

In this post, instead of writing about how to give yourself compassion and other things you can do to heal emotional pain and live well when you have a chronic illness, I’m going to write about a personal experience in which I experienced a lot of healing of my own emotional pain.

Earlier this month, my computer overheated, and without warming, shut itself off. I lost four or five sentences that I had written in a couple of files and hadn’t saved.

As computer mishaps go, it was a very minor one. But like most of us, I have experienced some major losses and upsets in my life, and the emotional pain from them must have gotten triggered, because I got very upset and angry. In fact, I got furious. I felt like God, for some reason, had it in for me and deliberately caused my computer to shutdown.

Now I know that isn’t true. Many years ago, He (note: I’m using He not because God is a he, but because the English language doesn’t have an appropriate pronoun), let me know, in a very profound and life-changing way, that He loves me and you and everyone unconditionally. But the knowledge from that wonderful communication wasn’t enough for me to stay calm during that unexpected experience.

When I get really upset from minor mishaps, I do two things. The first is to try to understand why I got so upset, and the second is to do my best to heal the emotional wound that got triggered so that it doesn’t get triggered the next time.

In this case, I was not able to clearly identify the cause of the trigger. But I was able to heal the wound. The healing that happened is hard to describe, but I will do my best. It occurred at a men’s group I attend. During the processing and healing part of the meeting, I chose one of the other men to play the role of God. While the two of us stood in the middle of the room, he acted like he really did have it in for me.

As I write this, I’m thinking it must sound kind of strange to a reader who wasn’t there. But the role playing made me feel like God really did have it in for me. It was a very painful experience. But then, and I can’t explain how it happened, I realized I was still standing and was really okay. Somehow I realized in that moment that God has given me the strength to get through the challenges life presents. And not only did He give me the strength to get through them, but He also gave me the desire to discover and do the things that bring me joy after I do get through them.

I hope this description, strange as it may sound, helps you get an idea of the healing I experienced.

And more than that, I hope that after reading it, you see how you have the strength to get through your challenges, and that no matter what your chronic illness and other challenges have been, you discover and do things that bring you joy.